Finding righteous currents in turbulent times

Archive for the tag “Anonymous”

Israel is busy changing passwords, increasing bandwidth and strengthening computer firewalls in preparation for an assault by the cabal of hackers who call themselves Anonymous. The collective has announced it will target Israeli websites, not only those of the government and military but also banking and commercial interests.

One wonders: Does Anonymous hide behind the cloak of secrecy because the hackers fear reprisals, or because it’s a front group performing dirty tricks for some sovereign nation? If it later turns out these hackers are stooges for Vladimir Putin, no one should be surprised or shocked.

Reuters Social Media Editor Matthew Keys has been indicted by the Department of Justice for conspiring with the hacktivist group Anonymous. Keys could face up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines for allegedly helping the group attack the website of one of Keys’ former employers. If the charges are true, Keys not only has broken the law, but also violated the few standards still applied to working journalists.

The faceless hackers who belong to the collective Anonymous want to wipe Israel from the Internet. It’s time these slugs who hide under the cloak of secrecy were exposed to the sunlight. These vigilantes not only mistakenly think they have a right to police the Internet, but also to serve as its self-appointed judges and executioners. They fashion themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods, when in reality, they’re low-life criminals and ego-frigging maniacs. H/T SourceFed

First the North Koreans threaten to nuke us. Now the Anonymous beehive is pledging to rain down chaos in retribution against the US Department of Justice for strong-arming Internet guru Aaron Swartz, compelling him to commit suicide.

Anonymous hacked the US Sentencing Commission website on Saturday and implanted this video warning. Lord knows, the Department of Justice is hardly a paragon of justice. But it’s impossible to take the Anonymous cyber Robin Hoods seriously when they hold forth riff and raff like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as their idols. Go ahead boys, hotwire a Cheetos factory and strike a blow for global freedom. H/T Small Dead Animals

The Anonymous hackers might fashion themselves modern-day Robin Hoods, but with their launch of Operation Israel, they have shown their true colors wearing the black and white keffiyehs of the Palestinian terrorists. Conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain aptly describes the Anonymous collective as “amateur ass-clowns,” seeking to tilt the balance of powers in a Middle Eastern conflict that could flare up and become an Armageddon.

For his impertinence, Anonymous launched an attack on McCain’s website (http://theothermccain.com) over the weekend, while simultaneously defacing several hundred Israeli websites and wiping out the database of the Bank of Jerusalem (although it was subsequently restored). The stated altruistic goal for all this thuggery: Maintaining Internet access to the Gaza strip. That’s so laughably thin, even Joe Biden could recognize it as malarkey.

Face it: The Anonymous hackers have thrust themselves into a subsidiary position as cyber-stooges for the Holocaust-denying Ayatollahs and their terrorist brethren. They are not Men. They are not Devo. But they probably should stock up on tights.

AntiLeaks, led by a shadowy hacker calling himself DietPepsi, is circling the wagons to thwart arch-nemesis — Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. From August 3 through August 13, the WikiLeaks website was driven offline as a result of a massive denial of service attack that DietPepsi claims to have coordinated. WikiLeaks remained out of commission until a US-based content delivery network, CloudFlare, agreed to disseminate the website. Saving Wikileaks’ hide won’t sit well in certain quarters, but CloudFlare has been embroiled in controversy before, having previously provided similar services for the hacking group LulzSec, as well as for the Turkish government.

Julian Assange at New Media Days, 2009, in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“We don’t discriminate against customers based on a political belief of what’s good or bad,” says CloudFlare’s CEO Matthew Prince, out of San Francisco. “We try hard not to play censor.”

With CloudFlare’s support, WikiLeaks re-emerged from Internet oblivion, but the US-based DietPepsi wrote the Des Moines Register vowing this wouldn’t be the end of the story. “WikiLeaks web server is now hidden behind five CloudFlare servers. CloudFlare isn’t actually hosting WikiLeaks content itself but acts as a reverse web proxy. This makes it especially difficult to attack WikiLeaks, as each CloudFlare server can handle 10gb/second,” DietPepsi said in an email to the Register. “”I am in the process of finding the actual IP address of WikiLeaks web server. I have a couple of leads and believe I will be able to do it, however it will take some time.”

To emphasize AntiLeaks’ resolve, DietPepsi claimed, via Twitter, that the group had taken down two other websites — one belonging to RT, the Russian global TV network, which has carried extensive favorable coverage of Assange, and a second website belonging to Bambuser, a Stockholm, Sweden-based firm that provides livestream video services for individuals to broadcast directly over Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The specific target in the Bambuser outage is believed to have been a “citizen-journalist” feed by a James Albury, who has been broadcasting from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has been holed up since June, fighting extradition to Sweden.

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks ally Anonymous issued one of its patented YouTube threats against AntiLeaks, promising, “We do not forgive. We do not forget. Aunty Leaks we request you dessist (sic) in your activity or you will Expect us.” Unbending, DietPepsi shot back on Twitter, “Semper fi. Expect us.” Earlier, he denied any connection with the US government, although WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson from Iceland has implied that such a linkage exists.

For visitors wanting more on this geeky battlefront, here’s an appearance by CloudFlare’s Prince, last fall on Bloomberg Television, explaining how his company has improved its web security services by building a better paradigm to thwart DDoS attacks, drawing upon its experience of deflecting the barrage stirred up against LulzSec.

And here is RT’s broadcast report about its website going down in the DDoS attack claimed by AntiLeaks.